Shuttle crew prepares to leave station

By Irene Klotz

HOUSTON (Reuters) -- Shuttle Endeavour astronauts on Sunday prepared to leave the International Space Station after a successful 12-day visit to install the first piece of a Japanese laboratory and assemble a Canadian maintenance robot.

The crew swapped spacesuits, leaving its newest gear and spare parts aboard the outpost, and packed up experiment samples for return to Earth. The shuttle is scheduled to depart the station on Monday.

For the first part of the day, the crew enjoyed time off.

"We had over 33 hours of spacewalking time (on this flight). It's great to see it behind us. The crew is due for a little rest," lead spacewalk officer Zebulon Scoville told reporters at Johnson Space Center.

On a spacewalk that ended on Saturday night, Robert Behnken and Michael Foreman performed chores that included Foreman checking out a balky rotary joint for one of the station's wing-like solar power panels.

NASA discovered metal shavings inside the mechanism last year and is trying to trace their source.

Space station flight director Dana Weigel said Foreman found no evidence that orbital debris had struck the joint, which eliminated one possible cause.

"That's a big help for us. That kind of narrows down one of the chains of the fault tree," she said.